Team Chemistry

“…your whole team-and/ Be Mor-gone than Freeman…”

[Note to loyal readers – I know, I know. This piece isn’t really that funny. It’s not even up to my crappy standards. If I had to characterize this piece, I’d characterize it as “filler,” pure and simple. Hopefully, though, it will produce at least a few chuckles.]

To a certain degree, life is all about teamwork under stress. In college and law school, I have had a lot of opportunities to work on group projects or in teams on various things, with some successes, some failures, some study-group horrors, and some outcomes that belong in a “what not to do” pamphlet. I have come to the conclusion that some people just aren’t meant to be teammates, and that forced teamwork can be worse than overloading an individual with stuff to do. Sometimes, you just have to cut the dead wood. Here are some examples.

In college, I had a teacher who assigned at least two group projects a semester, with the teams often selected at random. She often made us make a group presentation to the class, culminating in a discussion/debate about the reading material. I landed in a crazy group once with “FratBoy,” an oversized dummy who never came to class or did any of the reading, “Pigma,” a fat sorority girl who liked to bite off more than she could chew (pun, again, intended), “Hottie,” one of the hottest girls I have ever seen (unfortunately engaged to a dim-witted jealous-type from back home), and several other people who had a genetic disorder against contributing to the group. In our first meeting, which lasted about twice as long as it needed to, FratBoy kept desperately trying to impede our progress by asking me basic questions about the reading we were supposed to have done the week before in order to complete the group work. For instance, he would ask me a question about a certain theory of the book, to which I would give him a correct answer in 2-3 sentences, which he would then attempt to re-characterize in four totally-off base words, only three of which he had the intellectual capability of memorizing before the exam. Here is an illustration of the extent of our conversations:

FratBoy: So, what does the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs do?
The R.D.: Well, the OIGA is an organization that consists of fairly high-ranking officers from several areas and branches of government. One of the things [the professor] wants us to get from it, I think, is that it really helps deal with [a problem where different levels of government each attempt to address the same problem, causing inefficient behavior when they butt heads]. We saw this in [a certain case study].
FratBoy: Oh, so they help Congress, right?
The R.D.: [thinking] -- #%@^&*%#*@ !!!!

In order to get the hell out of there, I just started saying “Right!” whenever he attempted to “Cliff’s Notes” my interpretation of the reading. I don’t think I ever saw that guy again.

To make things worse, Pigma volunteered to spearhead the presentation to the class. I knew she would flop like a wounded duck in front of the class, but it was less work for me, so I agreed to write some stuff up for her. However, in one of those “I knew it” moments, Pigma, giving new meaning to the word “dead weight,” writes me this unsolicited email the night before the presentation, telling me she was “really sick,” and that “she knew I’d do a good job in her place” at the presentation. Of course, she didn’t send anything to anyone else, I in no way was her “backup” for the presentation, and she hadn’t prepared a thing, meaning our grade was feast or famine based on what little prep work I could do in a few hours.

The presentation ended up going okay, thanks to Hottie and my work on it, but as an added slap in the face, Pigma had the gall to show up for the presentation and watch me do all of her work. I would characterize her “serious illness” as moderate sunburn and possibly a hangover. The only saving grace was that Hottie and I got most all the credit, made fun of Pigma the rest of the semester, and I got some extra credit for being a presenter. Hottie thanked me, but not in the way I had hoped. Instead of telling me something like, “Your presentation was magnificent. It made me realize I need to stop settling, dump my current, slow-witted man and find someone like you…,” I had to settle for a “You were wonderful,” and count my blessings.

The moral to the story? Just as large knockers have taken some good men off the market into the arms of bad women, so too can a large engagement ring allow a good woman to fall for a guy so insecure that he would not even let Hottie study with me alone in a public library. And I’m not that good looking. Not at all. Just clownin’ (except about my looks) -- the real moral – keep the dead weight as far from responsibility as possible. I handled FratBoy right, but I let Pigma rake me over the coals twice.

Another experience to which I still have trouble understanding was my experience on a flag football team. Now, our team was the subject of several misadventures, some chronicled elsewhere, but what comes most naturally to this column was our team’s love affair with a player I’ll call “Egowen.”

Egowen on paper was the greatest flag football athlete ever created. He could have played college ball in several sports. He ran and could change directions faster than an alley cat running from a Chinese restaurant. He was stronger than an ox and cut like Stallone in “Cliffhanger.” He could catch, he could throw, he could kick the ball farther than I hit a golf ball, and he could play defense. In short, he was a dessert topping AND a floor wax. Rightly, we hung on his nuts like white on rice. But when I was ready to cut the cord, some of the rest of the team wasn’t, and it may have cost us a title.

The problem with Egowen was his attitude – he loved himself and at times couldn’t be bothered by the rest of us, whom he regarded as “weekend warriors.” Our first year of playing football together, Egowen hurt himself during the first game of the year and decided that it wasn’t worth “pushing it” by playing for us again and jeopardizing his status in another sport. The rest of the team and I were totally okay with this; our health came first. However, we were all pretty surprised the next year when Egowen decided to play with a rival team in the same league as ours. He claimed that he did not know there were two separate teams with his friends on them, and we all believed him (and I think his assumption was probably justified). However, we were all appalled when Egowen not only failed to atone for his honest mistake by showing up for the match against us that year, but also proceeded to single-handedly defeat us in the match of his former team (us) against his current team. You see, Egowen’s team that year was made up of a bunch of flag football scrubs, just like us. We were beating them when they decided to simply hike, hand off, or throw the ball to Egowen on every single play. They didn’t even try to fake us out. It was all Egowen, all the time, and we just could not stop him from making first downs. Then, they put him in on defense, too, having him rush the passer. They ended up beating us by like 3 points. Then the rest of the losers on his team, who only contributed to the victory in the sense that they showed up, preventing a forfeit, had the chutzpah to brag about “their win” over us.

Ah, but the tale does not end there. We decided to play one more year in the league, and the following year, we begged Egowen to play on our team. He did, but only sporadically. Here is a list of what happened that year. See if you can spot a pattern.

Game One – Egowen plays. We lose.
Game Two – Egowen shows up. We lose.
Game Three – Egowen does not show up. We win.
Game Four – Egowen does not show up. We tie.
Game Five – Egowen does not show up. We win, and make the playoffs.
Game Six – Egowen plays. We lose.

See a pattern there? I did too. To make matters worse, Egowen got hurt again in the first game of the year. He said he did not want to risk himself for other sports. We understood. However, we found out that after Egowen got better, he started playing flag football on another team, and never came back to our team until we made the playoffs and our Quarterback asked him to come back. In our final game, Egowen, known for his strong kicking ability, even missed an extra point. He described the team that beat us as a “bunch of great guys,” despite the fact that they tried to run up the score on us both times we played them that year. In short, Egowen is not going to get my vote for man of the year anytime soon.

I don’t know what it was about Egowen. Maybe he thought we were losers. Maybe we just relied on him too much, like a crutch. Maybe we just got lucky without him. Or maybe, as I would like to believe, there are some people who ruin team chemistry so much that it is not worth it to have them around, no matter how great they are at what they do. Maybe it was a combination of all of these. I don’t know.

I don’t know what would have happened had we played that last game without him, but I would have liked to find out very much. We probably would have lost by four touchdowns instead of three. But, at least I would have been able, as the ball was hiked, to look to my left, look to my right, and look back, and know that, win or lose, we were going to do it as a team.

The moral of the story: sometimes you can choose your team, and sometimes you can’t. When you can’t, keep the dead weight off your chest, lest they take you down with them. When you can, know that what looks good on paper isn’t always what works best in practice.

And that, they say, is why they play the games….